Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend E3 this year – instead, I’m on vacation in Cape Cod, using awful hotel Wi-Fi to watch streamed press conferences. Not the most glamorous way to take it all in, but exciting announcements, great games and new details are welcome no matter how you hear about them.

Here’s my personal transcription (in very brief form) of all the announcements and showings, along with some reflection on what Microsoft had to show.

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Good news for Wii owners: the upcoming on-rails shooter, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, will feature co-op play. While it isn’t the most exciting concept for a game, Umbrella Chronicles sounds like it’ll definitely be worth picking up if you’re looking for something to play with a friend on Wii and don’t care for mini-games.

This comes way of Famitsu, which has two pages dedicated to the game - scans can be seen on NeoGAF. While you might not be able to read Japanese, you can enjoy the screenshots, some of which feature my personal favorite, Albert Wesker. He always looked so good in those sunglasses.

Sure, the convention is much smaller this year and all, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a ton of games to be seen. Eurogamer has posted a list of the announced lineups and then some of what you’ll be seeing at E3. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have been quiet on what they’ll be showing, so it looks like we’ll need to wait until their respective showings to know for sure. The event is taking place next week, so expect it to be a busy week in news.

Capcom today released a horde of screen shots for their upcoming, newly multiplatform title, Devil May Cry 4. For fans of the series, there’s a ton to be gleaned from the over fifty new screens released, including shots of playable characters Nero and Dante and their custom attacks. Also featured are two boss stages featuring the demons Frost and Belial in ice and a bunch of environmental shots from the ice and fort city stages along with some concept art. The screen shots seem a little uneven, though, probably representative of the early stage of development; the fort city renders look good, and hopefully the action will live up to past installments.

IGN reports on the latest issue of Famitsu, which has a new spread on Biohazard 4: Wii Edition. The US version was previously hinted at via an accidental leak on the Gamestop website for June; these new details assure gamers that the title is real. The Famitsu article details the new Wiimote functionality in the game. Gamers will use the Wiimote for cursor aiming, the B trigger and a shake of the Wiimote allows the user to reload, and motion-sensitive actions are used for close up attacking. Other features in the Wii version include new beginner-friendly difficulty settings and the additional content from the PS2 release. Finally, for those looking for insight into the upcoming Umbrella Chronicles Wii release, there will be a game trailer included on the disc.

Capcom today announced that the latest game in their action series, Devil May Cry 4 would no longer be a PlayStation 3 exclusive. The company today announced that the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game will ship simultaneously, with a PC version coming later. The Capcom press release states that each version will be developed specifically to take advantage of each platform’s hardware, but doesn’t list how the feature sets will change. No specific ship date for Japan or America was announced. With this announcement, though, Sony loses yet another exclusive title for the platform. Part of the issue may be the fact that the PlayStation 3 hasn’t yet achieved critical mass for developers; without many consoles sold, it may be hard to justify platform-exclusivity. The larger issue may be that next-generation development costs may simply be too great for third party A-list titles to stay on one platform. Still, this has to be a hard hit for the PlayStation 3.

Nope, it’s not a port of a PS2 or Xbox title, it’s not a me-too entry, and it’s not even a Virtual Console game. CAPCOM today announced their first real, honest-to-goodness Wii exclusive, currently titled Project Treasure Island Z (working title, of course). The adventure game is geared towards puzzle solving with your Wiimote and features crisp, bright slightly cell-shaded graphics, making it look an awful lot like some of the latest Monkey Island entries.

Thanks to the point-n-click abilities of the Wiimote, I’m hoping to see a resurgence in adventure games, that genre of an era gone by. Lucasarts, do you hear me? Telltale? A little Sam and Max love would be nice too :-D. Click the jump for the full press release and the first set of screenshots.

Capcom’s Clover Studio has been responsible for some of that publisher’s most creative games; Clover’s Okami was extremely well-received by critics, but unfortunately, those excellent reviews did not translate into sales. Last year, Capcom announced that the studio would be dissolved. Now, the primary creative forces behind Clover, Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, and Shinji Mikami, have formed a new independent studio called Seeds. No announcement has been made yet about either game titles or platforms supported, but the Game|Life blog has a translation of their introductory statement.

Games Radar has a really interesting and insightful piece about the games that, in their words “had it, and lost it”. Just think Tomb Raider, and you’ve got the idea - these are the games that were fresh, original, and fun, until their producers started hastily making hundreds of sequels and ruining the franchise.

This is a great read, and somebody who obviously knows their games. I shed a little tear for each of the titles on this list.

1up.com has done a little trolling through the ESRB database and found some interesting titles. Games like Kirby’s Adventure and Kid Icarus appear in the database for the Wii, but a new entry, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior is listed. While this title could be for something other than the Virtual Console, this seems unlikely. Hopefully, having Capcom on board will mean that gamers will get to see other classic titles like Bionic Commando.